Who's in the dustbin of history?
Lately I've thinking quite a bit about the ideas that Jared Diamond articulated in Guns, Germ, and Steel and Collapse. His ideas are infectious in the best way possible and inform my daily interpretation of current events and history more than any other thinker I have read since college.
However, last night I found myself reading Philip Meggs' History of Graphic Design and started thinking about those few civilizations whose imagery and mythology survive conquest. What got me thinking was a little reminder about the complete unoriginality and general lameness of the ancient civilization that gave birth to my religion.
You see, the Hebrew alphabet is just a bastardized version of written languages developed by the Phoenicians and the Cretans. What's more, little tidbits of mythology--the idea of a Book of Life and Death--are directly borrowed from the Sumerians and the Babylonians. Hebraic architecture isn't that exciting and the empire never really got big or lasted long enough to be more than a footnote of history in a region teeming with demisocieties without the ongoing devotion of its descendants.
And don't get me started on how early Judaism could hardly be called pure monotheism. But I digress.
So what about this? What I find interesting about the history of the Jews is that our little footnote in history is a notable exception to any overarching theory of historical development.
Josh Greenberg presented this point to me when I first started reading Guns, Germs, and Steel last fall. "What about the Jews," is the apt question he presented to me. I said then, and still feel, that the Jews just don't matter in meta-history. We are a tiny segment of the population and our influence on history is not as Jews but as actors in the cultures that we inhabited. In Turkey, Spain, Poland, Iran, and India we participated in those societies, not the other way around. There is no Jewish civilization, there are only Jews in other civilizations. No big theory could possibly be expected to accommodate every piddly civilization that gets folded into bigger ones.
And yet there is still Judaism and Jews in every corner of the planet. The question, however, does not apply only to the Jews. I immediately remembered the Hmong and Goans, both ancient peoples who have been conquered repeatedly and maintain strong identities and affinities to their homelands whilst scattered around the planet.
What of these civilizations who, when relegated to the dustbin of history, manage to hang on to their identities, who manage to keep to themselves, construct social structures and taboos that demand isolation and cohesion? What of these landless peoples and how many more are there around today that I haven't thought of?
I would love to read a history of these hangers-on of history. Does anyone know of a good one?
Who is this guy?
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